In late March, Serial’s
host and journalist, Sarah Koenig, was on campus to talk about the
podcast’s success. (Her talk, organized by the Sarah Doyle Women’s
Center and the Swearer Center, was part of Women’s History Month.)
Koenig, a producer at This American Life when she began working on the podcast, said the effort was launched with modest expectations.

“We thought if we could get an audience of 300,000 people,” she said,
“that would be a really good target for us and allow us to continue
into a second season.”

Serial reached that target within five days of its October 2014
launch. Since then, the podcast has averaged an unprecedented 6.5
million listeners per episode—compared to 2 million for an episode of This American Life,
Koenig said. Serial takes a second look at the 1999 murder case of
Baltimore teenager Hae Min Lee, which resulted in the conviction of her
former boyfriend Adnan Syed, who claims he is innocent.

Over twelve episodes, Koenig delves deeply into evidence from the
case, scrutinizing cell phone call logs and interviewing key witnesses.
Along the way, she takes readers along the process of making sense of
what she is finding. “The outcome of my reporting I don’t see as
extraordinary,” Koenig said. “So why did Serial come to feel like something new?”

Presentation was key. Koenig said she initially wanted the podcast to feel like a good book on tape, but her This American Life
colleagues, including Ira Glass ’82, nixed that idea. “They told me,
‘Don’t ever say that out loud again,’” Koenig said. Instead, Serial is structured like a television show, with a theme song and a “previously on” recap at the beginning of each episode.

The part of listeners’ brains that lights up when listening to Serial, Koenig says, is the same part activated while watching such television fare as Breaking Bad or House of Cards.
“We’re used to having this feeling from escapist entertainment,” Koenig
said, “and this was real. It was journalism. So, suddenly it felt like
this new thing.”

Another reason for the podcast’s success, Koenig believes, is its
attempt to pull the curtain back from the psychological and emotional
elements of getting the story. Reporting is “uncomfortable and a little
messy,” she said. “Instead of hiding that messiness under a clean
narrative, at times that messiness became part of the narrative, became
part of the story.”

Koenig spent forty-two hours on the phone with Syed while reporting
the podcast. At her talk, she played several clips of their
conversations, some serious and some playful, that never made it onto
the podcast.

“Uncomfortable as it is to admit it,” she confessed, “sometimes
there’s a little flirting going on. This relationship is not purely
professional, but it does not qualify as a friendship. It pretends to
be straightforward, but there are fissures of distrust all over it. And
it changes all the time. It’s still changing.”

Sage Fanucchi-Funes ’17, a coordinator of the event, conducted a
question-and-answer session with Koenig after her talk. Her advice to
aspiring journalists? “It’s a perfectly fine thing to be bad at your
job until you get good at your job.”

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The Brown Alumni Magazine is published bimonthly, in print since 1900.